A secretive U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from
intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of
telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch
criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely
involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show
that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such
investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also
sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents
are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover
up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say
violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If
defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to
ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information
that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
"I
have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a
Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to
2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more
troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has
been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward
stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily
drug dealers.

"It is one thing to
create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary
crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up
investigations."